GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force Overclocking Motherboard Review

Intel Z87 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 Performance Testing

There are a number of different Super Speed USB 3.0 host controllers out there. In order to know which ones perform the best we run a series of tests that will put the controller through the ringer and see how it comes out on the other side. Each of our motherboards uses a different Super Speed USB 3.0 controller and you can find the below.

CrystalDiskMark is a small benchmark utility for drives and enables rapid measurement of sequential and random read/write speeds. Note that CDM only supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) with a queue depth of 32 (as noted) for the last listed benchmark score. This can skew some results in favor of controllers that also do not support NCQ.

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: The GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force uses a pair of Renesas uPD720210 USB 3.0 hubs to split up the chipset SuperSpeed USB 3.0 ports into six ports on the back panel and one of the internal USB 3.0 headers. The remaining internal USB 3.0 header is straight out of the chipset and as we can see from the performance numbers above, the Renesas uPD720210 USB 3.0 Hubs are detrimental to the performance. The internal header had an average sequential read and write speed of 410.9MB/s read and 354.5MB/s while the USB 3.0 ports that run through the Renesas hub averaged 397.5MB/s sequential read and 339.3MB/s sequential write.

HD Tune Pro 5.00 is an extended version of HD Tune which includes many new features such as write benchmark, secure erasing, AAM setting, folder usage view, disk monitor, command line parameters and file benchmark.

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.50 Read Benchmark Results

Intel Z77 SuperSpeed USB 3.0 HD Tune 5.50 Write Benchmark Results

Testing of the USB3 was done using the “Thermaltake BlacX 5G Hard Drive Docking Station . The drive used was an Corsair Force GT 240Gb SSD.

Benchmark Results: The results between the various ports on the GIGABYTE Z87X-OC Force were even greater in HD Tune. The back panel USB 3.0 ports with the Renesas hub had an average read of 209.9MB/s and an average read of 194.2MB/s. The internal header which isn’t connected to the Renesas hub had an average read of 241.0MB/s which is 14.8% faster and an average write of 215.3MB/s which is 10.9% faster.